[aprilnya]

On the other hand, there’s been a bug open to make a simple harmless change to fix this in Android for 9 months, with no response from Google other than asking for reproduction steps as far as I can tell.

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238

Some comments on the bug accuse Google of intentionally not fixing it to make people buy Pixel Buds instead of AirPods.

I wouldn’t say that myself, but then again I also wouldn’t say that Apple intentionally violated the spec just to make AirPods not work on Android.

[charcircuit]

Buganizer is not where you submit code to be reviewed and accepted into Android. And by the author's own admission that change is a hack and not a proper fix. Anyone is free to make a proper fix and upstream it if they wanted to.

[TheDong]

No one has presented a remotely correct fix anywhere on that issue, or elsewhere to my knowledge.

You're welcome to write an actually correct patch for android if you want, one that isn't just commenting out code and probably breaking some spec-compliant bluetooth devices.

Make sure to test your patch against all the bluetooth devices in existence to make sure it doesn't regress.

Do that, make a PR, wait the average third-party-android-PR review time (approximately 5 years), and then if your PR isn't accepted at that point we can maybe say Google is intentionally ignoring this issue.

[wzdd]

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238#comment829 seems fine and only has the potential to break other Apple BT hardware, which is relatively easy to test.

Nobody actually productively commenting in the thread thinks it's a conspiracy theory and everyone acknowledges that the Apple hardware is off-spec. It would be nice to see Android add this workaround.

[heavyset_go]

"The bug", aka not implementing spec violating behavior, also exists in BlueZ, the Linux Bluetooth stack. Is the BlueZ team taking kickbacks to make sure earbuds don't work on Linux, too? They were Google Summer of Code partners, too, so this potentially goes pretty deep.

[aprilnya]

Does it? The LibrePods readme doesn’t mention any special patching required on Linux but maybe I’m missing something